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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27053788">Swallow</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goldmonger/pseuds/Goldmonger'>Goldmonger</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Supernatural</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Coda, Episode Tag, Episode: s15e15 Gimme Shelter, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Multi, alternate title: Where in the World is Sam Winchester?</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 20:27:11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,892</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27053788</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goldmonger/pseuds/Goldmonger</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam is present. Even if it doesn't feel like it sometimes.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Sam Winchester &amp; Amara</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>72</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Swallow</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>these are tough days for sam fans. stay strong y'all.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He feels her before he sees her, though it’s not much more than a whisper of air across the nape of his neck. The shadows around him thicken and grow, like they’re straining to reach for something, and the resurging rush of passing cars and semis fades to a layer of static. It’s like tunnel vision; the threat draws all of his attention.</p><p>“Me again,” says Amara.</p><p>On instinct, Sam backs up, and doesn’t stop until his legs hit the Impala’s trunk. They’re pulled into yet another gas station, and Dean is gone – off to alleviate his rapidly souring mood. Sam had suggested he buy a pack of pork rinds again, at a loss for anything else to do. Maybe, considering the day’s events, he should have insisted they stay together.</p><p>“Dean forget to pay the bill?” he asks, the joke tumbling flat to the ground between them. Amara doesn’t bother answering his question, but appraises him carefully, like a mycologist with a particularly aggressive strain of mould.</p><p>“Sam Winchester,” she says, tasting his name experimentally. “You’re a stranger to me.”</p><p>He doesn’t reveal his surprise, though he unclenches a little. At least it’s not a direct challenge. “We know each other well enough,” he says awkwardly, and tries not make it obvious that he’s searching for a returning Dean.</p><p>“I don’t think so,” says Amara, getting closer, and he notes that the descending dusk has melted into a midnight sky, starless velvet. The gas station is lit, there are headlights on the highway visible from where he’s standing, but they warp and smear, dimmed to grey.</p><p>“Dean said you two came to an agreement,” says Sam, struggling to keep the panic out of his voice. “You let us go –,”</p><p>“Yet I’m curious,” she interrupts, barely spitting distance from him now. She’s oddly beautiful in her array of sharp angles, her eyes protuberant and depthless. He can’t get his limbs to move.</p><p>“Curious about what?” He waits for Dean, for his uselessly drawn gun. Their confrontations generally end the same way.</p><p>“You.” She tilts her head. “You are a matched soul to one that was almost mine. It fascinates me. Especially now that we may become partners, in a plot against my brother.”</p><p>Sam gapes. “So – you’re going to help –,”</p><p>“I haven’t decided anything,” she says crossly, and sighs. “This is ridiculous. Just – look, come with me.”</p><p>She closes the gap and grasps his arm, and before he can do more than flinch, he’s blinking a woodland scene into focus. Trees sprout sparsely around them, stripped by an unforgiving November, and bracken crunches with burgeoning frost beneath his feet. His breath plumes silver in the gloom. He knows it should be pitch-black, where he is, but he can see Amara and the world around her with crystalline clarity.</p><p>“Where are we?”</p><p>“A quiet place,” she replies. She folds her arms, as though she could sense a chill. “I like diners, I like cities and smoke and people, but it’s nice in the wilderness. It’s life and stillness, all at once. Reminds me of the old days.”</p><p>“The old days.” Sam scoffs, though it emerges as more of a gasp. “You mean –,”</p><p>“The beginning of the universe, yes.” She shrugs. “There was a purity to our existence, you know. We were two halves of a perfect whole. The only conscious thought.”</p><p>Amara steps through a log, the rotting wood evaporating into a fine, charcoal-coloured mist. Leaves, twigs, and a single unfortunate moth are treated to the same fate as she walks sedately to a nearby boulder and sits on it.</p><p>“So,” she says, crossing one leg over the other, settling back. “Down to it. Tell me why I should trust a couple of humans over my brother, the light of creation? I’ve heard from Dean, yes, all that bottled heat and rage and desperation, but you –,” she frowns, “– you are a mystery to me. You are the unknown quantity.”</p><p>Sam purses his lips. “What does that matter?”</p><p>Amara’s eyes narrow, the warning rising from her like steam. “I am debating whether or not to hand you to my brother on a platter, and your response is to ignore my concerns? Do you have a death wish?”</p><p>Sam snorts. “You don’t need us to make your decision. Dean made his pitch. You know what Chuck has done –,”</p><p>“Dean made his pitch,” she echoes, and there’s an odd quality to her tone now, inquiring, almost soft. “What about you?”</p><p>“I’m with Dean,” he says, like he’s reading from a script. He might as well be. There’s nothing behind the words, no conviction, no resentment, no doubt. It’s rote, tedious to him, like saying he’s a hunter, or that his mother is dead. It’s information that has been assigned to him, a comforting identity built by other hands. He’s with Dean. Even when he’s not.</p><p>Amara’s round, piercing eyes don’t waver. She lets the silence sink for several minutes before speaking again.</p><p>“My brother likes to talk about how I was a destroyer,” she says, apropos of nothing. “But it’s not true.” She lets her shoulders slump for the first time, and it’s this lapse in decorum that makes her seem a woman, instead of a creature. Sam doesn’t let himself relax, even so. He’s too familiar with the damage that can be wrought by things that seem to be beautiful, that lie about vestiges of their humanity so they can wriggle under his defences.</p><p>“The dark is repelled by the smallest light,” she continues, seemingly oblivious to Sam’s tension. “He ruined me, over and over, following me when I ran, when I tried to carve out space that would be mine alone. His light was relentless. I didn’t know how to sleep, so I never did.”</p><p>The tree branches sway, though there’s no wind. There should be animals scuttling through the brush, chittering in the night, but Sam can hear nothing but his own breathing; he can listen to nothing but Amara’s voice.</p><p>“My brother spanned my world,” she says, her throat bobbing. “He was everything that wasn’t me; the only thing I was able to touch. When he locked me away – a part of me was sure – so sure – that he was doing it to keep me safe. That he knew something I didn’t. That it wasn’t that I was too loud, or his only equal, or a threat to the universes he wanted to birth into being. He was protecting me. I wanted to believe it.”</p><p>“How do you know he wasn’t?” Sam asks. He sounds wrong to his own ears, too harsh for the serenity of the scoured woods.</p><p>Amara looks up, at a sky that seems closer and closer, seeping into their surroundings like ink.</p><p>“My brother,” she says, “values compliancy above all else. You must have learned this by now.”</p><p>“He likes things to go his way,” Sam agrees, thinking of the many pantomimes of murder that Chuck had shown them with glee, endless scenes of grisly horror. The man – entity – enjoyed perversion like any drooling, pumping voyeur, only this particular peeping Tom was in control of the show. “He gets what he wants.”</p><p>“Usually,” says Amara. “Sometimes it can feel like there’s no point trying to speak. He fills the emptiness. He fills every space.”</p><p>She’s staring at him, but it takes another few seconds of buffering for her implication to smack him squarely in the face. It’s probably an issue that his first reaction is to laugh, but it’s not like he has a history of total rationality.</p><p>“Dean’s not like Chuck,” he says incredulously. “We’re on the same page. I want to stop Chuck just as much as –,”</p><p>“Of course,” she says easily, and Sam’s protests trail off into the silence provided by a tomb of darkness and dying trees. They study each other in the cool, motionless air.</p><p>“What do you want from me?” he says eventually, letting his exhaustion creep into the words, into the weight of his head, stooped from years of research, of anxiety, of acquiescence. “What do you want?”</p><p>“The truth.” She eyes him, her skin opalescent in non-existent light. “You have been so quiet, in all the time I’ve known you existed. The complementary soul. I want to know you as you, not an extension of someone else, especially if I’m tearing myself apart for your cause. Speak up, little Sam Winchester.”</p><p>Once, Sam would have snarled at her presumption, would have leapt to a ready stance and aimed a gun between her eyes. He would have wielded a knife, maybe, serrated on one side, carven with runes. His sweat would have blinded him. He would have been fuelled by fury, intense in his knowledge of justice and the stark contrast between blinding <em>right</em> and pathetic <em>wrong</em>. These days he can summon traces of it at the sight of Dean’s blood or Jack’s fear, and it’s enough for him to throw himself at the problem of the week, but the fire is gone. It was stamped out a long time ago – not in the Cage, he doesn’t think, not quite. Maybe it was the years after that, when the torments continued, when his sacrifices were rendered pointless and naïve. He’s been on autopilot for a while. Now he lives for the small stuff: coffee shops, and books, and his brother humming while rain patters the roof of the Impala, the world a wash of meaningless colour outside of them. It’s enough. He’s made sure it’s enough.</p><p>“I’m with Dean,” he says.</p><p>Amara smiles sadly. She’s a figure of white and black, barely distinguishable from the night.</p><p>“Tell your brother I have a lot to think about,” she says, gentle, as tangible as the Cheshire Cat with his lingering teeth. She’s dissipating before his eyes, and he feels abruptly, hideously lonely.</p><p>He’s still squinting when he’s assaulted by a glare of neon orange, the gas station blooming from nothing, the din of traffic and human voices right along with it. He digs the heels of his hands into his eye sockets and tries to remember where he’d left the car.</p><p>“Sam! Jesus fucking –,”</p><p>Something collides with him roughly, and he’s only prevented from toppling headfirst onto the pavement by a pair of fists twisted into his jacket.</p><p>“I’m fine, Dean,” he says wearily, swatting at his brother’s forearms, corded like woven rope. His nerves are frayed, Sam realises. He looks up at Dean, guilt setting in at the sight of his bloodless face, his hardened jaw. “Sorry.”</p><p>“Where were you? I thought – I thought –,”</p><p>“It was Amara,” he explains, figuring she might reference their little excursion in their next meeting anyway. Better to avoid unnecessary white lies. With him and Dean, such conveniences tend to mutate into tragedy.</p><p>“She took you?”</p><p>“She wanted to talk about our plan,” he says, as Dean’s hands relax, and fall away from him. “She wanted another reason for us to work together.”</p><p>Dean’s expression is genuine and blank when he says: “why would she want to talk to you?”</p><p>Sam can feel his mouth stretching in what must be a decent impression of sincere humour, because Dean looks open, interested, no malice in his question, no insinuated cruelty in his assumption of authority. He’s uncomplicated, Sam reminds himself. He makes things uncomplicated.</p><p>“No idea,” he says.</p><p> </p>
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